Processing facilities are often managed using process control systems. Example processing facilities include manufacturing plants, chemical plants, crude oil refineries, and ore processing plants. Among other operations, process control systems typically manage the use of motors, valves, and other industrial equipment in the processing facilities.
Advanced control and optimization techniques are typically limited by the amount and quality of information that can be provided to a control application. Often, more or higher quality information can be provided to the control application if additional instrumentation is added to a control system. However, tradeoffs in control fidelity versus cost are often made as a result of the high overhead associated with the addition of hardwired instrumentation. In turn, some critical economic aspects, not necessarily related to robustness of control, are left out of the control optimization problem, resulting in suboptimum economic situations.
Additionally, in some typical cases, information must be inferred via complex calculations or otherwise because direct observation using typical instrumentation is impractical or impossible. In short, because of the lack of operational information, true process optimization often cannot be achieved even when advanced control strategies are employed.